Literally everything about this is disappointing. "Almost" full support, for an "aging" machine, as long as you "don't need raw performance", and "the 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage may be a letdown". It's like they wrote an article about my love life.
Outside some couple of well maintained boards (you know which one), the rest is just kept together "working* by using some obscure patches around some specific tags or git repositories, that meanwhile get deleted or archived. And if you want also GPU acceleration, then you might be out of luck in many, many cases
I wish the world would keep staying on x86 as much as possible, since it's battle-tested and has broader support than ARM.
My homelab/PC setup is roughly 60% ARM/x86, with ARM powering my main rig. I wouldn't care to keep the x86 stuff around, except I need to keep building/testing on x86, and most of these machines are still far from EOL.
If you'd also consider appliances like Switch or Apple TV, then a combined ~99% of my gaming is also on ARM. (Waiting to see how Stormgate will fare here.)
> Outside some couple of well maintained boards (you know which one) [...]
Vote with your wallet. The Raspberry Pis are back in stock, and they're great.
Need more power? The new Macs are absolutely great. I'm eyeing Asahi Linux too. It seems it can't do USB-C video yet, which is how I've so far avoided having a KVM switch.
> [...] "the 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage may be a letdown" [...]
Sounds very decent for something you'd throw in your backpack for a quick trip to the server room.
Of course YMMV on each and every use case, 3 years ago I was the one throwing rocks at ARM Macs, but we've come a very, very long way.
> Need more power? The new Macs are absolutely great. I'm eyeing Asahi Linux too. It seems it can't do USB-C video yet, which is how I've so far avoided having a KVM switch.
Unless something changed very recently, Asahi can’t do any external video on the Mac Books (only HDMI on the Mac Mini, and maybe not all variants thereof).
External video on Asahi Linux is the only thing keeping me from considering a Mac Book Pro purchase. I simply can’t stomach working without a 27” 4K monitor.
Was it that they weren't interested in the 386, or had they already promised OS/2 for the 286, and now had to honour the cheque Marketing wrote?
It's possible they got lapped by Compaq to the 386 because MCA was so much new and custom tooling and they had to deploy an entire coherent ecosystem on day 1, rather than just saying "It's an AT with a faster CPU."
For $50, I bought a used Acer Aspire 5 Full HD 1080 laptop (MD Ryzen 3 3350U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx 2.10 GHz), 4.00 GB RAM, 118GB drive with Windows 11 Home. I upgraded it to 17GB RAM, 2TB drive with Ubuntu 23.10. Screams past both my Windows and MacBook laptops with "superior" credentials (and prices). I hardly ever use Windows or macOS any more.
Sorry, you are absolutely correct. I felt it was wrong when I typed it - the weird thing is that `free -g` returns 17, which is what I checked before typing. But in actuality there is 20GiB - bank:0 has 16GiB and bank:1 has the original 4GiB (confirmed by `sudo lshw -c memory`).
definitely worth considering, thou the replacement usually involves trading known, worked-around bugs for unknow and unmitigated ones, the fresh theming may make up for the inconveniences.
probably EmacsOS can be run on that laptop. No guarantee one will be able to edit files though (but that's the same as on other computers and Emacs ) :)
Chromebooks with original chromeOS work awesome under the hood, fast startup, no standby/resume glitching, very long battery life - but the user facing side of the OS is just horrible.
And with using stock software, you are very limited.
Unless you boot a full linux in a VM, but that comes with a worse performance.
In developer mode, it is a perfect travel laptop for me as I mostly just need node and chrome dev tools.. but it would be nice, to run just any linux software, without using a VM. (and without having your OS deep integrated with google)
So I would love to have my chromebook with a true linux - but then the glitches will come again in my experience .. even the stuff that is marked as "works" often won't work the same as with ChromeOS. And I don't feel like picking up that fight again.
I run pure linux all day long on my Chromebook. Linux mints XFCE edition actually. The chromebook was free, found in recycling. Battery had 5 cycles on it. Installing an libre efi firmware bios was the ticket! So easy, I’m surprised you haven’t figured out you can already do this. Screw Google’s horrid “official” ways. They’re all bad.
See: https://mrchromebox.tech/
I use a 7 year old 2 GB / 32 GB Intel Atom for random surfing and travelling. Running Linux of course. Probably ARM would be even better.
It's not fully as snappy as a big machine and you would not be able to run a couple of containers / Electron apps / a modern IDE on it. But it's fully usable for 99% of users / use cases.
This planet cannot support many GBs for every human. So called modern computing is an incredible waste of resources, Android being amongst the worst.
Edit: Sorry for claiming 1 GB RAM first. Didn't remember correctly, fixed after turning it on and checking.
Mind sharing more details on your setup? (Distribution, window manager, and, most importantly, browser)
I have something similar (but an even older netbook). I'm using Alpine, i3, and mostly w3m (or Midori if JavaScript is needed). Given that Windows 10 on the netbook was completely unusable, it's impressive how functional it is with Linux.
It cannot handle modern bloat, however. Firefox just eats up memory until the machine freezes and I can't run a single Electron app for too long. Sadly, those make up far more than 1% of my use cases.
Overall, it's nice for distraction-free computing. I learned Common Lisp and Emacs exclusively on that little netbook. I probably would have gotten distracted by some shiny web page partway through if I'd been using my more capable desktop.
Edit to clarify: I'm curious what all you're able to accomplish with your similarly spec'd machine.
It's mostly a standard Xubuntu with full disk encryption (just in case the machine gets stolen while travelling) i3 might be even better. I use that at work, but was too lazy to configure it on this machine.
I have desnapped it though and download Firefox directly from Mozilla. There is no Chromium on it.
Edit: I know that it would choke on opening an ever growing number of Firefox tabs. I just close them. And I don't run the machine for more than a couple of hours before shutting it down. Don't use suspend at all.
Edit2: It uses swap. Don't remember whether that was the standard setup or whether I added it myself. Of course you cannot rely on swap for responsive operation, but it helps parking some unused data because the desktop/distro is not optimized at all. And it helps you to get over a tight situation when you forget to close something. When it slows down it's a nice reminder to do so.
Firefox can indeed work with only 1GB, although so little RAM imposes some restrictions on the OS and desktop used. Here are two VM examples: Alpine Linux and DietPi, both using XFCE as desktop manager, with Firefox plus HN front page loaded and one terminal window.
Is that a setup you use regularly, with other apps? How is your swap space configured?
My lived experience on Alpine, with no desktop environment on 1 GB is that Firefox needs more memory than that. Browsing the super-lightweight HN site is probably ok, though!
For travel is use a 10" intel atom + 4G RAM convertible tablet with touch screen (Lenovo brand) that runs Void Linux + Gnome. If it had 2G of RAM i'd run xfce but that would harm the detached-keyboard use-case.
Once it's past LUKS passphrase prompt in initramfs, i can use it with the touch-screen only for simple tasks.
It's fine for use with a decent amount of tabs in firefox, reading mail in thunderbird and writing code in vim if i have to.
> Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones
The differences are marginal; my 7 year old i5 really doesn't use that much more power than a modern i5, if it even uses more power in the first place (I don't have a good way to measure this, and with sleep states and whatnot you really need to measure this to be sure).
A few years ago I calculated how much impact it would be if everyone would run a 30W server at their home 24/7; I originally started doing that because someone said that "everyone should just self-host these things at their home", and I wanted to demonstrate that this would have a horrible environmental impact. And turned out my initial thoughts were wrong, and impact was so small that actually, it didn't matter, and I didn't even both posting my comment.
And even if there would be a difference, energy of manufacture tends to outweigh energy usage of usage. There's a long chain of mining, transport, etc. etc. behind all of that I didn't calculate this, but usually the energy differences really do need to be quite substantial to justify the energy usage of manufacture.
Maybe I was horribly wrong and made a mistake; I didn't re-do the calculations for this comment out of laziness. But I do strongly encourage anyone to actually calculate or look up what the impact is, because initial "it's bad for the environment"-feelings could very well be wrong, and no one is served if attention, money, and effort is spent in the wrong places.
> A few years ago I calculated how much impact it would be if everyone would run a 30W server at their home 24/7; I originally started doing that because someone said that "everyone should just self-host these things at their home", and I wanted to demonstrate that this would have a horrible environmental impact.
This is non-sensical.
Up to ten years ago most lightbulbs consumed 40-60 watts EACH and no one bat an eye.
Heck, the cristmas lights on my Christmas tree absorb ~60 watts with the default pattern (i know because i measured it). I had to manually set a light pattern that consumed only 20W. And no one is crying about Christmas lighting.
Consuming 30W 24/7 for home is absolutely feasible, all modern homes can do that just by replacing a single old tungsten-based lightbulb with a led one.
Yup, seriously, people think an old 35w laptop is inefficient (???) meanwhile burning 60-100w light bulbs all over their home. Yeah, these days LED light bulbs are becoming more commonplace (8-13w or whatever), but even then, if your laptop consumed the equivalent of a few LED light bulbs I think that's pretty darn acceptable. The AC adapter for this X230 I'm using maxes out at 65w output, which I doubt it often hits due to my light usage and power-efficient configuration. A single light bulb.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say, or even what exactly you're commenting on? It's almost like you stopped reading my post half-way through.
In terms of reduction of usage of resources, using an already-existing computer is considered better than manufacturing new hardware. OECD suggests[0] embracing a circular economy to reduce production of waste and consumption of resources. Notably, in the province I reside, 98% of electricity is provided by renewable resources[1]. The electrical grid is already there, and the computer I already have is also already there. Generally speaking, no more resource extraction or pollution of the planet is necessary for me to continue on my computing activities with my existing hardware.
All I have time to write right now, but check out the concept of permacomputing and frugal computing... [2][3]
Circular can also mean recycling and resource recovery. That's what makes it a circle (-: But it's nice that you live near hydro, and you don't need a more powerful computer.
>Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones, I don't see how this is a real thing.
The vast majority of energy needed for computers is in the manufacturing. As [1] shows, the embodied energy in laptops has stayed largely constant over the last decade. The best thing you can do for the environment is to keep using an old laptop instead of throwing it out and replacing it, even if the new laptop draws fewer watts from the wall.
No exact calculation about GBs, just a general gut feeling that current resource consumption in the industrialized world is completely unsustainable. With smarter usage only a fraction of resources is needed for still decent user experience.
> Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones, I don't see how this is a real thing.
This computer is not on 24/7, but only very limited hours. So manufacturing a new one would a relatively high share.
Energy is the reason why I wrote ARM would probably be even better. But the Atom is pretty good too. The machine is fanless and when it was new the battery lasted nearly 7 hours (not for watching videos of course). Now that it's pretty old and still on it's first battery it still lasts several hours. Enough to read some news and do some trip planning.
You can also just get a used laptop that's 3-4 years old with 8-16gb of ram, and SSD, and some i7 or equivalent CPU for $300. They're insanely fast. Used laptops are dirt cheap. You can then just sell it after a few years and get another 3-year-old used one. Still great use of resources.
You know what? You can get a new laptop with the latest i3 that is way faster than a 4 year old i7 for a little more than that, and it comes with a warranty. Yes, warranty is actually useful for many people. And most Windows laptops are worth little after 3 years, so this $300 laptop probably is only good for donations after a few more years.
(If you have any questions, check out reviews, benchmarks and eBay. I speak from my own experience.)
Going by benchmarks, this seems to be true [0], which isn't too suprising, however once you select 16gb of ram and a 1TB SSD the prices get closer to $500...
I'd have to check benchmarks, but my 2018 $300 X1 Carbon with an I7 can play ten YouTube videos at once while having Webstorm, Pycharm, and Clion be responsive.
I have an aging 1.3GB smartphone running a modern Lineage OS, and it does many things surprisingly well - even runs a VPN in the background whilst surfing with Mull/Firefox.
One limitation I often encounter is that a site with lots of HD XL images, or JS demos with 3D libraries force a lot of background apps to be killed.
In most cases this is also fine, but keeping a VPN alive whilst browsing media heavy sites is becoming a factor that I'm thinking of retiring this beloved phone
What model do you have? It looks old, as just 1.3 Gb (why is 1.3, and not 1.5 or 2, weird number), but modern OS. I have a Nexus 6P, 3 Gb of ram and is still relatively snappy, but stuck on an obsolete OS (Android 8, and LineageOS is the same) quite forever.
Ads waste incredible resources at the edge and in the cloud. 99% completely useless because people just hate them. And the remaining less than 1% even more harmful, manipulating people to buy nonsense products nobody needs.
So yes I occasionally watch a Youtube video if it seems really useful. But that's not a tab I would keep open a second longer than absolutely needed.
I invest significant resources in my desktop. But my laptops? For the last 5 years or so I've used exclusively pre-owned chromebooks, cost about 50 dollars on mercari. Flash aftermarket firmware, install linux, and I'm in business. Its usually a celeron with 4 gb of ram, although my first was 2 gb. They're plenty snappy. Youtube loads pretty much instantly. Playing actual real games is probably a step too far, but as a second screen to just have and use around the house there isn't really any compromise.
The very same for me, I have 5 MacBooks collecting dust (some are broken, some aren’t), but 2GB Samsung 11” Chromebook is my favourite. It broke recently.
Any models you would recommend to check? I haven’t been in look for Chromebooks for years (like 5 years). I would rather buy small and tiny, and also very cheap. As my use-case is just slacking with it around the house.
When I need a new one I'm just looking at what's available for a decent price (usually local on Mercari, sometimes eBay) and then checking the list of supported models for the not-ChromeOS firmware at https://wiki.mrchromebox.tech/Supported_Devices
If it's supported and I'm comfortable with the method for disabling write-protect then I pull the trigger.
I usually install xubuntu, but on a couple models I've found Ubuntu/Debian based distros have some issues with the trackpad, but Fedora running XFCE works fine, so you may want to go straight to that if you're comfortable with Red Hat.
It's not about money. It's about using the planet in a responsible way. Unfortunately ruining the planet and harming many of its inhabitants is very cheap for many in industrialized countries.
I am never going to waste time on things like compilation when the laptop next to it can do it faster, yet convince myself "oh but it is better for the planet". I don't know what kind of idiot does that.
(Which is why I did not hesitate to replace my laptop when I found that a new laptop would be 1.5x-2x faster in everyday tasks.)
The question has already been used in my first post: Fully usable for 99% of the users. > 99% of the users never use a compiler.
Fully usable also means that you might have to adapt your your habits: Keeping many tabs open is just being unorganized for many users. For a programmer having to checking the documentation of many classes regularly, each of them on a different page it might be slightly different. But 99% are not developers.
I am developer. When I build Yocto I am glad to have 32 or 64 GB available. When I travel (for fun) I am glad to be able to use 2 GB efficiently, without really suffering from ultra slow reponse times. A couple of seconds here and there have not spoiled my leisure time.
>You can use lower grade hardware than that. But how is the user experience?
It depends on the software. When the developers are targeting the "average user", then everyone who uses hardware that's significantly older than average will be punished accordingly. This doesn't mean it's actually hard to support that old hardware, it just means that performance isn't a priority.
If everyone used old hardware for longer, then the software would support old hardware better.
Well, depends on the software and the workload. Some things just are not feasible with underpowered hardware, no matter how the software is written. Compiling large projects, or testing them with VM's, is the kind of thing one might legitimately want to use a high-end device for. But if all you do is write office documents, or use SSH to connect to some remote hosts, pretty much anything will work.
my 9 year old laptop, a 2nd gen i5 running, albeit with 4G RAM, can handle quite a few Electron apps. At the same time as Gnome, Postgres, the Java hunk that is Jabref, some python apps, Thunderbird and Firefox. Electron's really the minnow.
The issue is more about people changing their devices too often: I remember from years ago (so possibly outdated) that the average person changes smartphone every two years and laptop every 3/4 years. What OP is saying is that most people could totally work with an older laptop that doesn't have 16GB+ of RAM. Especially since most people are using cloud services anyway.
You may be lucky and have a phone that's reasonably well supported on alternative mobile linux os. postmarketOS has the most device support (but their criteria of inclusion is very low), UBPorts and Sailfish have some as well.
Not when android manufacturers/google refuse to give me the type of control that open posix systems provide. Android is a useless hostle system for people like me (and it's not because of improved security).
>Not when android manufacturers/google refuse to give me the type of control that open posix systems provide.
Can you provide an example of how Android does not give you the control that you seek, how it is useless, or how is it hostile? From my point of view Android is much more suited for being an OS targeting consumer usage than a POSIX clone. POSIX comes from a world with much different requirements that do not work in the modern world.
It tries, but between things like Firefox for Android not supporting hotkeys and chrome for Android not supporting middleclick, it seems like every typical Android app has some type of resistance to desktop usability in addition to their regular anti-user designs.
I think I had one of these. As I recall, it had an SD card slot, so I just put a 256 GB SD card in there and used it as the main storage. I had some compile-from-source Linux distribution on there, or maybe that was my NetBSD experiment. It worked okay.
Then the internal WiFi card broke after a year and couldn't be replaced. I couldn't be bothered to mess with a USB WiFi -- it was supposed to be for convenience! So it went to the thrift store after that.
Eventually I gave up, it is Windows with VM, macOS, Android or ChromeOS.
My Asus 1215B still has Ubuntu on it, latest LTS, since the broadcom driver was replaced, several distributions ago, the free alternative never managed to hold a wlan connection stable enough for long downloads, I have always to plug into LAN.
Even Crostini running alongside ChromeOS has restrictions regarding hardware support.
I feel that selling machines with 4GB nowadays is almost criminal. Even 8GB is bad if you can't upgrade.
Anyway, I won't consider Acer because I had a terrible experience with my son's laptop, because the hinges are just designed to break. To be fair, Acer fixed it even after the warranty had expired, but I can't get over how fragile the thing is.
It depends. Win 11 and Mac OS really need more than 8GB for a comfortable UX, but if you're running a lightweight Linux desktop 4GB is okay for casual browsing, and 8GB lets you do a lot of things wrt. useful work. These would've been considered very respectable specs a decade ago. Make sure to avoid Electron apps and you're good.
I ran on a 4G machine until very recently, and from experience I know you're right. You can still run "Electron apps" by the way, just not 6 of them, and not in combination with 28 Firefox tabs and full HD movie in the background. I did have some problems at times, but my dev usage isn't typical. I currently have 8G and I never have any problems.
But also: these machines don't ship with a Linux desktop, lightweight or otherwise. You need to judge these machines as-sold, and almost all are sold with Windows as the only option, and 4G really does seem so low I would argue it's just not fit for purpose as a general purpose device, and really shouldn't be sold as such. It's like a car that's advertised as a general-purpose car that can only drive 80km/h. Is it a perfectly functional car? Sure! But also: not really what people expect, and not really fit for purpose. It's fine to sell this if people know what they're buying, but most people don't really know what they're buying with "4G RAM".
Whether that is a sorry state of affairs or not doesn't matter, it's the reality of it.
Running linux mint on 4th generation i5 with 4GB RAM worked ok but 8GB was really more comfortable (as in never worry about RAM no more) and you can easily get some for cheap so it's definitely a quick easy win.
But the dramatic speed difference ? HDD to SSD. That one upgrade allowed to be a dev on that old machine for three more years, until the motherboard died last year, RIP. I got almost 10 years out of that hardware with two cheap and easy upgrades. Nice.
On the other hand I don't recommend hardware older that 2013 as you get in performances that are really not comfortable or capped upgrade :
That one Late 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook was usable but Linux was a pain to install on, RAM was capped at 4GB and it was not comfortable performance wise. Cheaper hardware for the same era is barely usable for casual tasks.
Another thing I didn't mention with the 4th generation i5 laptop is that the plastics are always the first thing that break and it's a bit of a pain to have to replace it although it's cheap. Went with Framework 12th generation now and I am definitely intending to keep 10 years too. It feels much more sturdy, it's very nice. You just need a nice physical shell with upgradeable parts imho.
>It's like a car that's advertised as a general-purpose car that can only drive 80km/h.
Trying to get the analogy: it can 'only' do 80, or there are lower speeds possible and 80 is the max?
I wouldn't mind a car like that...to and from work at the moment the most i need is about 45 tops.
> not practical in a lot of office/productivity scenarios
Most of them come with a web version, use that, it's what I do and never have any problems. And if a company only provides an Electron app with no web version the choice of Electron makes no sense and their product should be considered a toy, not a tool.
I feel you. On all my older laptops, the physical shell (around hinges specifically) is always what has died first.
Decided I would only go with a metal case after my old laptop's mobo died. Hesitated between a M1 and Framework but went with the Framework. It's sturdy and contrary to the M1, I'll be able to upgrade it (I could already if I wanted to actually). Maybe not the best performance per buck on the market but hey it's plenty enough, even for a dev, even for some gaming.
I love my Framework 13. I've never had a non-work laptop with a metal chasis but I'm in heaven. 2.8 lbs too. Feels like those high quality machines I always envied in college when I was too cheap to buy a decent machine (which would have absolutely been worth it, looking back).
Apple does have great build quality though. Having your machine _feel_ well built and sturdy really does feel good.
Half of them are from Maximilian Luz (@qzed, student), the other half are from Bjorn Andersson (@andersson, Linaro).
All of the hard work is done by them, instead of Qualcomm / Microsoft. The same applies for the rest of the ARM ecosystem :(
Another great example is Asahi Linux: the port was only possible because someone decided to reverse engineer the work of Apple - not because Apple wanted it.
Companies are usually set up to only care about profit and there's very little profit to be made by providing for niche uses, so it's going to fall on the enthusiasts to do the work.
I just wish that companies were more helpful when volunteers contact them.
The Acer Aspire 1 is getting really old at this point. Are there any modern ARM (or even RISCV!) laptops that are usable out-of-the-box with upstream Linux kernels/distributions?
(My laptop is dying and I need a new quality laptop that has good Linux support and battery-life.)
> The Acer Aspire 1 (A114-61) is an aging ARM laptop design built on the Snapdragon 7c Gen1.
Agreed: it's old. But from inside Qualcomm, I can report that there's a clear change in priorities. Upstream was important before but now it's absolutely paramount. This message is unambiguous, from the CEO. I saw that Snapdragon 8 Gen3 (a phone -- not laptop -- SoC) got patches posted relatively close to its introduction. Given that, I hope that we'll see the same thing for Snapdragon X Elite.
I don't have any access to the kernel team's plans so I have no idea what their schedule is like.
That could be a total gamechanger. With their new ARM chip's performance, if they are really prioritizing upstream contributions I could absolutely see a world where my next laptop is has a qualcom chip and runs linux. I have generally viewed Qualcomm as little more than pattent trolls for... pretty much the entire time I have been aware of their existence. It seems like they are intent on changing that and I hope they do!
That's super awesome to hear. I am continuously surprised by how long it takes companies to pivot to compete effectively with Apple. The M1 came out in 2020? ARM support is part of the puzzle but the architecture lags so badly. And it's not just Qualcomm. Intel, Samsung, Google, Marvel, you get the picture.
Interestingly, Qualcomm was shipping its ARM-based/Windows laptop chips prior to Apple's intro of the M1 Macbook. But they have failed to make a dent in the market. I think having something that amounts to ~parity in performance is not good enough to help lure customers to a new ISA. Like the M1, you have to give customers a really great story about switching.
Apple is pretty unique there, right? They are the only ones selling macOS devices, so if you want macOS, you are eventually going to go to M-series. And they have enough control over the stack that, when they say it’ll go smoothly compatibility-wise, most people treat that as at least… plausible, for most use cases.
>I think having something that amounts to ~parity in performance is not good enough to help lure customers to a new ISA.
Most people use computers to Get Stuff Done(tm).
Windows RT can't run Win32 and ARM can't run x86, at least not without significant caveats; people can't use Windows computers like that to Get Stuff Done(tm).
M* Apple on the other hand can run most x86 era MacOS software; people who were using Intel Macs to Get Stuff Done(tm) can use newer M* Apple Macs to Get Stuff Done(tm).
Computers are tools, their sole purpose is to enable their users to Get Stuff Done(tm). It is the natural order of the universe that Windows ARM computers, unable to Get Stuff Done(tm), completely and properly failed to capture market share.
> Windows RT can't run Win32 and ARM can't run x86, at least not without significant caveats; people can't use Windows computers like that to Get Stuff Done(tm).
Whilst what you say is true for Windows RT, Windows 11 on ARM64 absolutely can run x86 and x64 software [0]. Kernel mode software needs to be built for ARM64 but most user mode software should just work.
For what it’s worth x86 emulation predates Apple’s Rosetta 2, and x64 emulation was made available at about the same time [1].
Isn't the windows' x86 emulator excruciatingly slow? If memory serves, people considered it barely usable. I remember videos from the time where even dragging a window was something to behold.
This is where apple made it transparent: rosetta 2 is completely invisible thanks to the introduction of the x86 memory model on M* chips that all other Arm socs lack, and that rosetta 2 leverages.
You may say that and it may be true now, but on launch there were issues and those are enough to hurt confidence that things will work (hence no buy). Microsoft loves messing up launches, Apple absolutely nailed theirs.
I thought that info is outdated by multiple years? Windows on ARM can run x86 (since windows 10) and also x64 (since windows 11) just fine. The problem is that the devices you can buy are somewhat underpowered for the price, e.g. a surface pro with ARM is more expensive and less performant than the intel-based one (and they still don't offer an amd-based one)
> M* Apple on the other hand can run most x86 era MacOS software;
Except for dropping 32bit libraries and all that?
> people who were using Intel Macs to Get Stuff Done(tm) can use newer M* Apple Macs to Get Stuff Done(tm).
Nope. Quite a few of those people needed bootcamp to get some software to run.
Bootcamp is dead now and you are encouraged to run virtualized windows on arm; does x86/x64 emulation work properly inside such a VM?
I cannot say for windows, but apple provides rosetta 2 for linux, to be run in a vm [1].
However, some would argue that if you need windows software, then you should not buy a mac in the first place. And I would argue it's microsoft's job to get windows running on M*, not apple's.
> You run win 11 arm in an arm VM and it's the windows 11 inside that has its own x86 emulation :)
That was the question. For instance, as far as I understand WSL generally does not work inside VMs (because WSL2 or 1 or whatever number transparently uses another VM itself). So I wasn't sure whether WoW64 does work inside VMs, glad to hear it does.
The claim was that you have great backward compatibility due to Rosetta ... except that due to 32 bit libraries that is not actually as useful as claimed. Not sure what your correction is?
ARM devices running Windows didn’t even focus on or reach performance parity before; it was mostly a winning-on-price strategy (but the savings were not quite worth it).
... but i bet it had been in development for 5+ years before that. Not to mention it's an iteration of the earlier Apple phone chips.
> ARM support is part of the puzzle but the architecture lags so badly.
One thing to note about this laptop is the storage is eMMC. Even whatever's in the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi only has one pcie lane, and they didn't bother including a M.2 nvme slot for storage?
They're all still in the phone with crap storage mindset. It's not so relevant how fast your CPU is (and it's probably reasonably fast) if the software runs off storage that's slower and has more latency than sata...
That's quite surprising to me because I remember the pain of building / updating Android distributions, often held back by old kernels. Qualcomm did have their own relatively well available kernel version, but it still significantly differed from mainline.
Do you know the exact model that is supported? Acer Aspire 1 A114-61-S94P (Acer P/N: NX.A4DEB.002) currently retails for €250, and it looks like a great device for many usecases.
I'm not seeing Qualcomm upstream support for their old phone/tablet SoC's to the kernel mainline, that work is still being done by the pmOS folks and other community members. New phones will probably benefit more.
Sadly support is fairly good but IMHO not there yet for a daily driver: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support. Microphone and external displays are not working. Plus, you rely on macOS for firmware updates.
An AMD ThinkPad has nearly the same performance, and much better software support thanks to x86_64. The compromise is decent but not great battery range (7-10 hours), mostly because of an older fabrication process.
With that said, I prefer the quality of MacBooks and Apple customer service here in EU is miles ahead of Lenovo (outsourced, crazy prices). So a viable alternative would be awesome. Some Intel MacBook Airs used to be fantastic Linux devices.
Note that HDMI out supposedly works on the pro, so the missing functionality is just the microphone, touchid, and thunderbolt/usb4. (Unless you have a usb3 display or really like dongles).
I am happy to dock my laptop to one usb-c dock and not have to deal with hdmi, mouse, keyboard and jack output every time I come to my office.
For most users Linux Asahi is only usable as a daily driver in non pros contexts on Mac Laptop and you'd be better of dedicating a computer (a mac mini?) for the office.
With it being modular there's always the potential for CPU upgrades in the future. But yes, it's much less performant than a modern x86 or Apple Silicon device. Performance isn't the primary goal, though admittedly it would be nice.
This will of course never happen but imagine if there were an M1 CPU module for it.
Qualcomm is maybe more realistic but from what I've heard it seems like they won't even talk to you if you're not ordering in huge quantities.
Unless they become bankrupt and no new modules will be released. It's hard to place faith in the future of a company like that, especially when I need a powerful CPU right now.
It's interesting you say that, since that's one of the major benefits of open hardware - you're not beholden to the survival of a corporation to continue having support for your tech. Anyone can come along and get a PCB produced by one of the many "print on demand" services. Someone with similar skills to the team at MNT can pick up the entire ecosystem and build entirely new hardware for it without a shred of friction or red tape (or threat of lawyers lol) ... pretty badass if you ask me. Worst case scenario you hire/crowdsource someone to build an updated CPU module.
This is talking about ARM devices not x64, so the comparison would be an android tablet having "nearly complete" Windows support. I am not aware of even one current gen tablet you could claim that for, but maybe you know of one?
Not really and misunderstanding what is meant for the sake of a pun. For the wording used in the article, your case is usually stuck at "complete" but very unpolished. E.g. all ports, sound, power etc. will work (fingerprint probably not), but sound might not be great, sleep might still use too much power, mic quality is bad,... (source: also using linux for 20 years).
For the remaining polish, that is not surprising. That is also usually not the case with windows itself but rather additional work by the manufacturer. E.g. a few years ago I bought some lenovo laptop without windows. Installed a fresh copy of windows and sound, color profiles, mic quality etc. are decidedly unpolished out of the box, unknown devices in the device manager, ... . Spending some time to get all this from lenovo then fixed these issues, but again that was not done by windows. So I would also not have high expectations of polish for windows on chromebooks or "asahi windows".
I’ve always found modern Lenovo laptops to have a proper Windows integration - you can install a fresh copy of Windows 10/11 and the OS will automatically find and install drivers (and even BIOS) updates via the standard update mechanism.
In fact, I only recommend/buy Lenovo laptops for family members now and reinstall stock Windows for them to remove all possible bloatware without losing any hardware support.
Yeah, not quite sure why this is being lauded as anything but pedestrian... I run several very old laptops like 1st gen i3 old, and they work fine, 0.3mp webcams even work, that's always basically been the case as long as your old hardware isn't super weird.
There are some things that simply do not work under Linux because of lack of driver support. An example is fingerprint readers. I agree that most x86 laptops are usable under Linux.
Fingerprint reader works fine on mine. But then I bought Lenovo because they support their hardware including making drivers for their fingerprint readers.
It's a hit and miss unfortunately. On my Lenovo Yoga 920, it doesn't work for example because there is no driver support. Similary on my Acer laptop too.
> On my MacBook M3, Windows doesn't work. Similarly on my Chromebook too.
I mean, if it isn't a supported platform that's hardly the operating systems fault. However there are plenty of systems that do have drivers and are supported.
The original quote was that the best supported is WSL, and that is not true.
Actually since Virtual Box and VMWare got good enough on Windows around 2010, but having one less thing to install, pay license for, is definitely welcoming.
Honestly, I'm inclined to agree with you. When our employer wanted to transition away from Linux desktops (which I'd used for 10 years to that point) to Windows Laptops I pushed back and got a MacBook Pro. I felt like being unix-y made things easier with deep integration of the shell.
However, I recently bought myself a Windows laptop (for games and miscellaneous other things). When I've tried doing a bit of development on it I've been pleasantly surprised. The WSL2 integration works well enough that it actually is probably easier than my development environment on MacOS where I have to worry about lots of subtle differences (and since getting it replaced with an M1 MBP due to the battery expanding - some not so subtle differences).
Because there's no platform standard or unifying governing body to define a boot interface, device enumeration interface or power management interface. The PC has UEFI and ACPI which somewhat suck in their implementation or usability but have the big advantage of just existing everywhere there's an x86 CPU.
Because they're massive SoCs with tons of onboard peripherals that aren't hooked up through some bus with discovery, like PCIE. You need tons of (often custom) drivers for those peripherals + device tree map to tell the kernel how to hook up all those drivers.
4x A710 and 4x A510 cores. There's been Axx5 variants of both since but still a fairly compelling offering. $200 is a lot more than an rpi5, but a much more modern set of cores and it's a full computer (screen, keyboard, case).
Various RK3588 boards out there now have pretty good performance (better than RPi5), great I/O support, and up to 32GB RAM (good luck getting the 32GB tho). Orange Pi 5 Pro is one but the one I ordered is this:
Agreed that the ram size is problematic. If there was a gen 3 m.2 slot I'd probably be ok living off zram. But this just seems too confined to be useful, in spite of having cores that should be better.
I also looked around & it seems like an Intel n6000 just wallops it in most benchmarks. Disappointing.
RK3588 has 4 lanes of PCIe 3 and a variable number of PCIe 2 lanes (variable because they share pins with other interfaces).
Most boards with RK3588 use the 4 PCIe 3 lanes for an SSD M.2 socket.
A carrier for 4 SSDs could use a more expensive PCIe switch for high performance, or it could split the 4 lanes to the sockets for low cost.
The main competitor of RK3588, Intel N100, is claimed to have up to 9 PCIe 3 lanes.
Nevertheless, I believe that they must share pins with other interfaces, because all the computers that I have seen with Intel Alder Lake N are starved for PCIe lanes and in none of them the M.2 socket uses 4 lanes, but usually only 2, or even only 1, so their SSDs have reduced speed, lower than in most RK3588 computers (but the N100 Gracemont cores are significantly faster than the Cortex-A76 cores of RK3588).
Yeah the board I ordered just splits them to 4 M.2 sockets.
My intent is to fill them with SSDs and use it as a NAS & Plex server. Or at least trial that and see how it goes.
Right now I'm using an old (2011) Mac Mini for this, and it's fine, but just one SSD drive, and I'm guessing the power consumption on this will be lower.
They are nice. Like a small PC. There's even a company making an (overpriced) mini-ITX compatible PC style motherboard with it.
They even have an onboard neural network accelerator. Though I perused the "documentation" for it and the SDK and I can't see how a person who doesn't read Chinese could make use of it.
If you look at people's Geekbench scores, they're actually really promising:
Depends on your intended use. I'm evaluating for use as home lab servers. I'll try this one for NAS/Plex, and if it works well I will buy another to use as an (external) server. For that purpose, multicore CPU performance (and I/O) really matters.
For typical things that people use Raspberry Pis for (turning blinking lights on and off with GPIO or whatever), yeah, not as relevant.
Just have to figure out an enclosure for it. It'd be amazing to put a few of these in a 19" rackmount case. I'd try Eurorack but it sounds like the carrier board width is 116mm, which is too wide for the 100mm height of a Eurorack card.
There are quite a few comments here saying this system is too out of date for modern use as a Linux laptop. What is a better alternative?
It’s not like I’m unaware what the answer might be. I have a very long list of manufacturers of nice laptops and for most of these I also have watch individual reviews of each, sometimes even after multiple months of use.
What I really need though is one person (or team) to sit down and try them all for multiple months and then pick a winner. Ideally with something breaking (or the reviewer pretending it had broken) and the manufacturers ability to fix it being included in the rating. Does such a comparison exist?
For ARM laptops intended to run Windows? Yes. Vendors can abstract away portions of their hardware design behind a HAL module that Windows will use in a way that can't be done on x86, and if the vendor doesn't make an effort to get code into upstream Linux then it simply won't boot. The ARM world is much more loosely defined than the x86 world. The vast majority of x86 laptops will largely work with a modern kernel.
> The EC functionality on the Acer Aspire 1 is implemented in ACPI but sadly ACPI cant be used to boot Linux on these Qualcomm devices
It would be interesting to hear mors about this part. Why is ACPI not an option? Last I heard, ACPI on ARM was solved, at least for UEFI boot. And if Windows can used it, why not Linux?
What I think they're saying is that ACPI does not provide hardware discovery (Plug'n'Play) on this hardware like it does on most x86. So you need to ship an accurate device-tree.
No.
Especially not as we get more of the accelerators working.
I would actually stick with the m2 if you were trying to do it today.
I now have the m3 booting Linux (but like USB does not work for real yet because apple changed power controllers to spmi based) but really good support is probably 6 months out since main focus is getting a good m2 release out the door (since that is where most users are)
